The Collector | How American cleric amassed a powerhouse Chinese art collection: he spent first pay cheque on it and just kept buying
- Zhang Daqian, Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, Fu Baoshi, Li Keran – Reverend Richard Fabian has works by them all, and more, in his 20th century Chinese art collection
- He began collecting at Yale in the early 1970s when hardly anyone else was and a Qi painting could be had for under US$1,000. Now it’s time to sell some
Imagine it’s your first day as a collector of Chinese art, your mentor hands you the catalogue of a recent, prestigious museum exhibition, and tells you to go and buy as many of the artists and periods featured in it as possible. This was the advice, given in all seriousness, to Reverend Richard Fabian back in the early 1970s, when a Qi Baishi could be had for less than US$1,000.
The American Sinophile had started buying art with his first pay cheque as the chaplain of Yale University, his alma mater. One of his greatest influences during his undergraduate days there as a Chinese studies major was the late Nelson Ikon Wu, a scholar and connoisseur who had written extensively about Chinese art and was especially enthusiastic about the late-Ming-dynasty artist Dong Qichang (1555-1636) and the much-later Qi (1864-1957).
Around 1977, Fabian moved to San Francisco and ran into an old friend of Wu’s, Tsao Jung-ying, the connoisseur from Taiwan who had settled in California in the 1960s, where he opened the legendary Far East Fine Arts gallery. “It was under Tsao’s guidance that I started buying Chinese painters of the 20th century,” Fabian says in a phone interview ahead of an October 9 Hong Kong sale of part of his collection. “In 1974, there was a superb exhibition in Japan of modern Chinese art from three museums in Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo, and Tsao said to me, ‘Just take it as your model!’”
It was a good time to be buying art, particularly if you were interested in a generation of artists steeped in the traditions of Chinese ink but thrilled with their new exposure to Western influences, he says. “Nobody in America was interested then,” he adds, “but a lot of the art had been taken abroad after the Cultural Revolution and prices were so low that nobody was bothering to fake them yet.”
Fabian bought mostly from auctions but also travelled to China to visit government-run art fairs and galleries. Over the years, he bought 200 pieces of calligraphy and paintings by a who’s who of modern Chinese art: Qi, Xu Beihong, Zhang Daqian, Fu Baoshi, Li Keran, Wu Changshuo, Ren Yi and one of his personal favourites, Qi Gong, the Manchurian member of the royal family who authenticated an early landscape painting that Fabian had bought.
Proving provenance became particularly tricky after the Cultural Revolution, Fabian says, when so many collections were broken up or sold secretly.